As I get older I’m affected more and more by cold weather. The prospect of taking the dog out for a well-deserved walk fills me with dread. Our 100-year-old house is one large draft covered by a roof; there are few places it’s easy to remain toasty without sitting under a pile of blankets. I’ve spent twenty years attempting to fill cracks, upgrade windows, add insulation, improve heating, and plug holes, but it still has little effect. My hands become icicles in October and don’t thaw until April. I lose all contact with my toes sometime around Thanksgiving and pray it returns for my birthday. This is partially due to my age and partially to my body type; I lose heat quickly even on warm days, and it’s only gotten worse since my 40th birthday.

A couple of years ago I found a couple of long-sleeve shirts on the rack at our local thrift store and grabbed them up; among them was an Under Armour shirt I wound up wearing a lot because the sleeves didn’t shrink after the first wash. This has been one of my pet peeves for years: I buy a longsleeve shirt and after two runs through the wash the cuffs only come down to the middle of my forearms  (Gilden, Champion, I’m looking at you). The Under Armour shirt held up well and didn’t shrink, so I started looking for them specifically on our visits. A year or so after that I found another, which said “ColdGear” on the tag. Intrigued, I tried it on, and found it was skin-tight, but felt warm, so I spent $6 on it.

What I found after wearing it on cold days was that it did keep me warm—far better than other shirts I’ve tried, and much more comfortable than multiple layers. It kept my upper core warm during snowboard trips, frigid junkyard runs, shoveling snow, and walking Hazel. So much so that I took my jacket off and stuffed it into my backpack the last time we went snowboarding. On subsequent thrifting visits, I found more of them, and stocked up for cold weather. They take some getting used to; I’m not normally a skin-tight kind of guy. After a day, they irritate my surgery scar—almost as much as wearing a fleece with a full zipper—but the warmth is worth it.

The next issue has been my feet. They only have two temperatures: sweating and freezing. They know no middle ground; they are as impossible to regulate as an overtired toddler on a candy binge. Any socks I have ever worn make my feet sweat, making the socks damp. In the winter, they will then freeze over into solid ice; in the summer they become a fetid swamp. This also limits the kind of shoes I can wear. Any shoe with lots of fabric padding inside will become intolerable within weeks. I’ve found that Nike running shoes made of thin webbing are the best summer shoes; meanwhile I have a pair of leather Keen shoes that are at least 15 years old I wear almost exclusively in the winter. The soles have been reglued twice; I will weep when they finally fall apart.

It comes down to the socks. I wore cotton socks for years, but they were no good. Even looking at polyester socks made my feet sweat. Some of the blends worked better than others; Timberland makes a sock I’ve been wearing for a couple of years that seems to work for fall and spring. A couple of Christmases ago, my sister got me a pair of SmartWool socks and these became the go-to for winter. I wore  that pair so much, I bought a couple more on sale.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I used these as my base layers along with a pair of bike tights for the junkyard run I made. I also had the good fortune of borrowing a set of insulated Wellington boots from my brother in law, which made a huge difference. It got to the point where I had stripped down to my jeans and fleece. Bike tights are pretty good, but I think I’m going to buy a pair of ColdGear leggings for our next snowboard trip.

I did a yard sale this Saturday for all of the stuff we didn’t sell a few weeks ago; our house is uniquely situated on Main Street so we get plenty of traffic. I didn’t put one sign out. In less than an hour I’d sold a lamp, the keyboard, my glass carboy, a small table, $30 worth of baby clothes,  and a bunch of other stuff. One of the things I’d put out was the Danish modern leather chair I inherited from my college roommate, who had inherited it from his father when we came back to school my sophomore year. It was the chair IKEA ripped off when they made the POÄNG, which later appeared in dorm rooms worldwide. It was comfortable, padded well, and made of beautifully laminated wood in single solid pieces (unlike the Swedish ripoff). When we got it, the stitching in the leather was beginning to come unraveled, and over time it got worse. By the time the chair made it to this house, the ottoman was in tatters and the set of the chair was not far behind. Finley used to try and eat the foam as a baby, so we retired it to the attic in the hopes that someday we could have it re-upholstered. After fifteen years, I gave up on that dream and out to the yard sale it went. At noon it was still on the curb with a big FREE sign taped to the cushion, and it stayed out there until this morning; when I got back from dropping Finn at school I noticed it was gone. I will admit, I was hit with a pang of regret; I will miss sitting in that chair as I remember it—all of the leather intact, with a beer, watching Letterman on our thrift-store color TV.

I have to go back to work today. I took last week off for some mental relaxation and to part out the green Travelall before the County starts leaving expensive love letters on our front porch about the abandoned junk in the driveway. I was still getting up early to help shepherd Finn to school while Jen fought off a cold, but I also used that early morning time to come up with a plan for each day. Right now my back is sore, my legs are stiff, my wrists ache, my right shoulder is throbbing, and my hands feel like sandpaper. They look like I’ve been bathing in grease even though I’ve scrubbed them with Dawn four times an hour. I was working from 9 until about 6 each day, pausing only to pick up Finn from school, yet it still felt like progress was very slow-going. I always underestimate how hard it is to get parts off an old rusty truck, and how much it kicks my ass on a good day. It’s been a challenging week, and it was Saturday when I finally got the last major piece I wanted off the truck. I took Thursday and half of Friday off to recharge my battery, but I still feel like I’ve been run over by a bus Monday morning.

I’m taking the week off from work to both burn through some PTO time and to part out the green truck in the driveway to hasten its departure, and with a few setbacks I’ve made serious progress on the project. With the exception of the power steering setup I’ve gotten everything off the truck I wanted. I’m taking Thursday off from laboring in the driveway both because I’m pretty well exhausted but also because it’s going to rain from about noon today until tomorrow morning. I’ve got a list of other things I need to accomplish—mostly errands to run and some small repairs around the house.

One surprise addition to the list is diagnosing an issue with the Scout blog, where an update to WordPress has broken something in the backend of the site where it won’t load the media library and every update/refresh to a post or page is rewarded with a blank screen. I’ve narrowed it down to an incompatibility with the 10+ year-old theme I’ve been using (a slight variant of which powers this very site) which is about as bare-bones as a theme can get—and is the primary reason I’m using it. After switching to one of the pre-installed templates, the site works fine. So, I’ll have to debug that situation later today.

I’m a bit frustrated at my lack of stamina this past week, to be honest. I realize I’m coming off a cold winter where I wasn’t as active as I was last summer, but being completely worn out after four days was sobering. I powered through Wednesday with snacks and a burger for lunch but I just didn’t have the amount or duration of energy I did last year. So I’ve got to figure out how to add more high-impact exercise into my busy daily routine, I guess.

I celebrated my birthday quietly at home, on a day that felt a lot like the day before it and the day before that. I walked the dog with Jen, we had coffee and breakfast, and then we went to work. I’d bought some marinaded chicken at Trader Joe’s on the weekend so I fired up the grill and cooked it,then shredded the meat and made quesadillas for the family. The girls bought chocolate cupcakes and sang happy birthday and I blew out my candle. That was a highlight, as were the many messages I got from family and friends.

Jen and I are gathering all of the files we need to do our taxes, and one of those is the 1099-G, which reports on our state refund from 2022. We need this for our 2023 taxes, so I did a search on the Maryland.gov website to log in and download it. The site I was presented with looks similar to stuff I built back in 1999, optimized for Netscape Navigator 4.0. Hesitantly I registered to log in to the site—which seemed to be asking for a lot more information than necessary—and after some fits and starts (anytime a website offers a field to create a new password, the rules for the password should be clearly spelled out next to that field) I hit ENTER and expected I’d be able to see my records and download them. Nope.

It then sent me an email from “Office365.messaging@microsoft.com” with a mysterious attachment named “message_v4.msg” and a button linking to a a pre-populated “protected message”.  Not dodgy at all. Knowing better, I clicked the link and was sent to a prepopulated Sharepoint page with boilerplate text requesting the state send me my record via mail and a signature field I couldn’t fill out. It took me a couple of minutes to realize I had to click a tiny button to then generate a reply window where I could enter my name, and it then required me to photograph the front and back of my driver’s license and attach them to the message. WHAT THE FUCK. At this point I knew my personal information was compromised. I hit send and was rewarded with a noncommittal screen which may or may not mean I was successful.

I’m pretty sure there’s a passport factory somewhere in Africa now pumping out dupes of my ID for doing crimes, and my SSN is all over the dark web being used to buy fentanyl and viagra. We will probably never see this 1099-G and need to file an extension for our taxes. I cannot believe this is the SOP at my state government, and that there is no portal that contains all of this information readily. But then, I also know that our local governments are being strangled by budgets and partisan fighting, so I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised.